pdfserenitynow was born from an increasing contact with annoying PDFs.

Developer comments

The biggest culprit is multi-layered PDFs which take forever to print, if you can get them to print at all. I created the original script to convert these PDFs to a more printer-friendly format (for the KIP series of plotters), namely flattened TIF Group 4. I can also use a JPG version of PDFs for easy viewing on our web-based content management system.

At this time, it converts a folder of PDFs to a folder of TIFs. It handles large, crappy, multi-layer PDFs if you have enough RAM. ImageMagic does all of the hard work.

In the future it will be smarter about converting and offer more target formats. The ultimate goal is a service where users can upload/submit a crappy PDF and have nice sets of TIFs and JPGs returned to them or put into their destination of choice. It will have a web control panel where you can monitor and manipulate conversions in progress or in a queue.